Epistemic Contextualism

Epistemic contextualism (EC) is a recent and hotly debated position.
In its dominant form, EC is the view that the proposition expressed by
a given knowledge sentence (‘S knows that
p’, ‘S doesn't know that
p’) depends upon the context in which it is uttered.
What makes this view interesting and controversial is that
‘context’ here refers, not to certain features of the
putative subject of knowledge (his/her evidence, history, other
beliefs, etc.) or his/her objective situation (what is true/false,
which alternatives to what is believed are likely to obtain, etc.), but
rather to features of the knowledge attributor(s)'
psychology and/or conversational-practical situation. (Hence this
view's sometimes being referred to as ‘attributor
contextualism’.) As a result of such context-dependence,
utterances of a given such sentence, made in different contexts, may
differ in truth value.

In addition to marking an important departure from traditional
epistemological assumptions, EC is claimed to provide a novel
resolution to certain puzzles about knowledge—not least,
skeptical ones—as well as to best comport with our everyday
knowledge-attributing practices. What follows describes the leading
forms of EC, so understood, as well as the principal arguments for and
major objections to EC. Along the way, EC is situated with respect to
certain other views, both kindred and competing.

EC, in the sense in which it concerns us here, is a relatively
recent development. Nevertheless, in the latter half of the
20th century, several at-times overlapping strands emerged
which, in one way or another, made ‘contextual’ factors of
central importance to certain epistemological questions, thereby
setting the stage for EC in its contemporary form.

One such strand was the entertaining of the possibility of some kind
of pluralism concerning epistemic standards. In one instance, this took
the form of the claim, in response to skepticism, that there are
“two senses of ‘know’”—one
‘strong’ or ‘philosophical’, the other
‘weak’ or ‘ordinary’ (see, e.g., Malcolm 1952).
So too, some of Wittgenstein's (1953, 1969) claims about the
relation between meaning and use and the multiplicity of
“language games”, each with its own set of norms, opened
the way for a more thoroughgoing kind of semantic pluralism with regard
to epistemic concepts and/or terms. Further, in a move which (as we
will see) foreshadows contemporary contextualists' methodology,
there was the argument for pluralism from cases: Hector-Neri
Castañeda's observing that “what counts as
knowing” that Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492
might differ depending on whether we are considering (a) a television
quiz show, (b) a high school student's essay, or
(c) a defence of the traditional date of Columbus'
discovery from some ingenious and famous Harvard historian's
claim that it occurred on October 11, 1492. (1980, 217); or
Gail Stine's taking it as obvious that “[i]t is an
essential characteristic of our concept of knowledge that tighter
criteria are appropriate in different contexts. It is one thing in a
street encounter, another in a classroom, another in a law court—and
who is to say it cannot be another in a philosophical
discussion?” (Stine 1976, 254).

Second, and relatedly, there was the emergence of ‘relevant
alternatives’ (RA) approaches to understanding knowledge.
Although, in the hands of Fred Dretske (1970, 1981) and Alvin Goldman
(1976), the RA approach was intended as an alternative to
justification-centered accounts of knowledge, it also, like the
strategy of multiplying senses of ‘know(s)’, promised a way
of giving skepticism its due while at the same time limiting the threat
it posed to our ordinary claims to know. The core RA notion is simply
that knowing that p is incompatible with any of the relevant
not-p alternatives' not having been ruled out. This
provides a way of limiting skeptical threats, just because skeptical
possibilities (that a certain animal is really just a cleverly
disguised mule, that I might now merely be dreaming that I am sitting
at my desk, that the seemingly intelligent agents around me are in fact
just automatons) might not be relevant, at least not ordinarily. As
Austin famously puts it:

[S]pecial cases where doubts arise and require resolving, are
contrasted with the normal cases which hold the field unless
there is some special suggestion that deceit, etc., is involved, and
deceit, moreover, of an intelligible kind in the circumstances, that
is, of a kind that can be looked into because motive, etc., is
specially suggested. There is no suggestion that I never know
what other people's emotions are, nor yet that in particular
cases I might be wrong for no special reason or in no special
way. (1946, 113; cf. ibid., 88)

Various specific RA theories differ as to just what ‘ruling
out’ amounts to and whether it is the agent, his/her evidence, or
something else again which does the ruling out. So too, different RA
theorists proposed or appeared to assume different
standards of relevance—thus, at one point Dretske suggests that
it has to do with “the kind of possibilities that actually exist
in the objective situation” (1981b, 63; cf. 1981a, 131); while
some remarks of Goldman's (1976, 89; 1989, 147) imply that it is
certain facts about the subject's psychological/conversational
setting which determine which alternatives are relevant; etc. But,
insofar as there is some interesting variation in the set of
relevant alternatives to a given proposition, we have the possibility
of there being a corresponding variation in what it takes to know that
p, and so a kind of pluralism here as well.

Third, among some philosophers there was an increasing emphasis on
regarding epistemic subjects, activities, and/or accomplishments, as
deeply ‘social’ in ways typically overlooked and
unappreciated. (For some discussion, see Goldman 2007.) Included here
is Richard Rorty's (1979) espousal of ‘epistemological
behaviorism’, as he calls it, as well as perhaps the first
explicit statement of a “contextualist” epistemic theory by
David Annis. According Annis, while “man is a social
animal…when it comes to the justification of beliefs
philosophers have tended to ignore this fact” (1978, 215)—more
specifically, they have tended to ignore the existence of
“contextual parameters essential to justification”
(ibid., 213). Thus, as Annis sees it, both foundationalists
and coherentists depict justification as a function of certain facts
about the subject alone, considered in isolation from his/her social
environment (‘context’). According to Annis, however, this
picture fails to do justice to what is in fact the social character of
justification. For instance:

Suppose we are interested in whether Jones, an ordinary
non-medically trained person, has the general information that polio is
caused by a virus. If his response to our question is that he remembers
the paper reporting that Salk said it was, then this is good enough. He
has performed adequately given the issue-context. But suppose the
context is an examination for the M. D. degree. Here we expect a lot
more. If the candidate simply said what Jones did, we would take him as
being very deficient in knowledge. Thus relative to one issue-context a
person may be justified in believing h but not justified
relative to another context. (Ibid., 215)

Finally, the potential relevance of social factors to
epistemological questions also arose in discussion of Gettier cases. In
particular, in response to cases involving evidence one does not
possess, John Pollock (1986, 190–193)—citing Harman (1968,
1980), who in turn credits Sosa (1964) with the idea—suggested that
there are certain things which we are “socially expected”
to be aware of and that such expectations bear upon whether one knows.
But if that's so, and if there is some kind of variability in
such expectations, there will be a similar, socially-based variation in
the standards for knowledge.

Each of the views or movements just mentioned makes
‘context’—of one sort or another—of
central importance—in one manner or another—to
epistemology, in ways not reflected in more traditional analytic
writings on the subject. Still, it is not difficult to discern in them
rather different views of the relevance of ‘context’ to
epistemology. Thus, among such views there are some—such as
Annis', which he intends as an alternative to foundationalism and
coherentism—which are obviously concerned with making
substantive claims about knowledge or justification itself. On the
other hand, some proponents of the various ideas just discussed are at
times clearly speaking, not about knowledge/justification per
se, but rather about the linguistic items we use in speaking
about such things. For instance, among Castañeda's
goals in his paper is to elucidate “the contextual semantics of
‘know’” (1980, 209).

So too, there are clear differences among the views just sketched as
to just how we are to conceive of context, insofar as it is thought to
be of central epistemological importance: sometimes it is conceived of
in ‘subject’ terms (facts about the putative subject of
knowledge, qua such subject, including features of his/her
environment, social or not); sometimes, the concern seems to be more
with facts about those who are attributing knowledge (which may include
the subject, albeit qua knowledge attributor), rather than the
subject of the
attribution.[2]

In terms of the views mentioned above, just where to locate a given
theory or theorist along both of these dimensions—a substantive
versus a semantic orientation of the theory; a subject versus
attributor conception of ‘context’—is at times not
at all clear. In current work in epistemology,
‘contextualism’ is used to refer to either of these now
more clearly distinguished threads, with the discussion of each going
on largely in separation from the other. Thus, on the
‘substantive’ side, we have as perhaps its most prominent
exponent Michael Williams (1991, 2001), whose concern is with providing
an antidote and alternative to what he calls “epistemological
realism”. According to the latter view, the objects of
epistemological inquiry (centrally, various exemplars of knowledge
and/or justified belief) have some underlying “structural
unity” that makesthem all instances of a
particular kind (1991, 108–109), independently of any
“situational, disciplinary and other contextually variable
factors” (ibid., 119; 2001, 159ff.). By contrast, as
defended by Williams, ‘contextualism’—which he sees as
present in the views of Dewey, Popper, Austin, and Wittgenstein, for
example—is the view that it is only in relation to the latter
type of factors that a proposition has any epistemic status at all
(ibid.), and that there is no need to suppose that the objects
of epistemological inquiry have some deep structural unity which binds
them all together. Meanwhile, on the semantic side, we have such
figures as Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, Mark Heller, David Lewis, and
Ram Neta, all of whom emphasize moreover the importance of facts about
the attributor (rather than the subject) of knowledge—such
things as “the purposes, intentions, expectations,
presuppositions, etc., of the speakers who utter these sentences”
(Cohen, 1999, 187–188; cf. DeRose, 1992, 1995; Heller, 1999b,
117ff.)—in affecting what is expressed by a given utterance of a
knowledge-attributing sentence.

The relation between these general sorts of
‘contextualism’—the substantive and the semantic,
as we might label them—is interesting and important. But, as
already indicated, the present entry will focus on the semantic view,
‘attributor
contextualism’.[3]
Henceforth, that will be the
view referred to in speaking of (epistemic) contextualism (EC).

So EC, of the sort which will concern us here, is a semantic thesis:
it concerns the truth conditions of knowledge sentences,
and/or the propositions expressed by utterances
thereof.[4]
The thesis is that it is only
relative to a contextually-determined standard that a knowledge
sentence expresses a complete proposition: change the standard, and you
change what the sentence expresses; acontextually, however, no such
proposition is expressed. In this respect, knowledge utterances are
supposed to resemble utterances involving uncontroversially
context-sensitive terms. For instance, just what proposition is
expressed by an utterance of

‘It is raining,’

‘I'm hungry,’ or

‘That's red,’

depends in certain obvious ways upon such facts as the location (1)
or identity (2) of the speaker, and/or the referent of the
demonstrative (in 3). Similarly, it is plausible (though by no means
universally accepted—see, e.g., Capellen and LePore, 2005a
& b) that attributions of tallness or flatness are
context-sensitive, insofar as there are varying standards that one
might have mind in applying either predicate and which affect just what
is said in doing so. Note, though, that insofar as the truth
value of such utterances “depends on context”,
that is because their truth conditions—or, the
proposition expressed thereby—are so dependent. That is, it is
not as though (1)-(3) each has fixed truth-evaluable contents, the
truth values of which happen to depend on context. Rather,
one is not in a position to assess any of these sentences as
true/false unless one knows the location of the utterer of (1), the
identity of the speaker (2), and so on. For it is only relative to
such facts that tokenings of such sentences have specific contents,
and just what contents they do have depends on context. So too for
epistemic contextualism: though the thesis is sometimes put in terms
of the context-variability of knowledge sentences'
truth values (e.g., Rieber 1998, 190, Cohen 1998, 289 and
2005a, 57), this is misleading: those truth values shift only because,
according to EC, different propositions are expressed in different
contexts.

Likewise, just because EC is a thesis about
knowledge-sentences' truth conditions—namely,
that they are context-variable—it is not a thesis about
knowledge itself. In the same way: recognizing that ‘I’ is
token-reflexive has no metaphysical implications about the self,
observing that ‘here’ is an indexical has no implications
about who's where or what it is to be at some location, and so
on. So it is misleading too when EC of the form under discussion is
described, as it sometimes is, as the view that whether one
knows depends upon context (Bach 2005, 55, n. 4 provides some
examples.) As Richard Feldman says,

…it is not true that contextualism holds that the
standards for knowledge change with context. Rather, it holds that the
standards for the application of the word ‘knowledge’
change. (Feldman 2004, 24; cf. Cohen 1999, 65; Bach 2005,
54–55)

EC, then, is an epistemological theory because, but only
because, it concerns sentences used in attributing (/denying)
“knowledge”, as opposed to those employing some
non-epistemological term(s); it is not a theory about any such
epistemic property/relation itself. Although, as we will see, when
various proponents of EC flesh out their preferred version of the
views, the differences among the resulting theories largely
recapitulate some of the major lines of division among leading theories
of knowledge itself.

Finally, though there are connections between them (touched on
briefly in Section 4.4 below), EC should be distinguished from the
general semantical-linguistic approach, or cluster of theses, called
“contextualism,” which sees ‘context’ as
central in one or another way to certain fundamental semantic issues,
most centrally meaning itself. (See, e.g., Recanati (1989, 1994, 2005),
Searle (1980).)

As its proponents generally admit, EC is something that one needs to
be argued into: it takes work to come to think, for example,
that there can be situations in which we have two subjects, exactly
alike psychologically, possessing the very same history and the same
evidence with regard to p, etc., with respect to only one of
whom ‘S knows that p’ expresses a truth,
since they are being evaluated from within different contexts: we seem,
if anything, to be ‘intuitive
invariantists’.[5]
As one leading contextualist
says, many “resist [the contextualist] thesis—some
fiercely. Moreover, those who do accept the thesis, generally do so
only as a result of being convinced by philosophical reflection”
(Cohen 1999, 78).

But while, in the abstract, EC strikes many as quite contentious,
according to its proponents it has considerable merits. Thus, although
EC is not itself a theory of knowledge or related epistemic notions, it has
been said to afford a resolution of certain apparent epistemological
puzzles, both ordinary and extra-ordinary. More specifically, EC is
said to give us a way of responding to certain cases in which we have
apparently inconsistent knowledge claims, each of which enjoys some
real plausibility. Though these puzzles are not exclusively of the
skeptical variety, it is EC's offering a solution to skeptical
problems that has figured most prominently in current discussions. So
that is the natural place to start.

Consider one particular form of skeptical argument upon which
leading contextualists have focused (e.g., Cohen 1986, 1988, 2005a;
DeRose 1995; Neta 2003a & b; cf. Unger 1975). We can call it
‘SA’, for ‘skeptical argument’:

P1.

I don't know that not-h
[h = some skeptical ‘hypothesis’; e.g., that
I'm a bodiless brain in a vat, being stimulated to have just
those experiences I would be having if I weren't a
‘BIV’].

P2.

If I don't know that not-h, then I don't
know that p [p = some mundane proposition which we
commonly take ourselves to know; e.g., that I have hands].

C.

So, I don't know that p

SA constitutes a puzzle just because (a) each of the premises enjoys
a fair amount of plausibility. As to P1, how, after all, could I know
that I'm not a bodiless brain in a vat? By waving my arms around?
As to P2, it is just an instance of the closure principle
for
knowledge,[6]
which many are
inclined to regard as axiomatic. But (b) given our intuitive
anti-skepticism, C seems immensely implausible, even though
(c) the argument appears to be formally valid.

On the face of it, then, we are confronted with a paradox—a
set of independently very plausible but seemingly mutually inconsistent
propositions. Because that is the problem, a complete solution
to SA will have to do two things (DeRose 1995): explain which of the
assumptions lying behind the generation of the paradox should, in fact,
be rejected, and why; and explain too how we got into this mess —
or, more formally, why the assumption singled out for rejection struck
us as plausible in the first place.

At first blush, it might seem that there are just three possible
responses to SA:

we can simply capitulate to skepticism, accepting SA's
conclusion and abandoning our claims to know such things as that we
have hands;

we can reject P2 and the closure principle upon which it
trades; or

we can reject P1.

Essential to EC is the idea that these three options do not exhaust
the possible responses to SA.—And, according to proponents of
EC, that is a good thing, since they generally hold that accepting
skepticism is something we should do only if we have to, that the
closure principle is extremely plausible, but also that it is hard to
see how P1 could be
false.[7]
But if none of (i)-(iii) make
for an attractive response to SA, what is left to deny?

Well, we might conclude (iv) that our concept of knowledge is
somehow deeply incoherent, and that epistemological paradoxes such as
SA are for this reason irresolvable. This is the view Stephen Schiffer
(1996, 2004) recommends. But that strikes many as no more satisfactory
than (i) directly embracing skepticism. Like (i), (iv) is a result to
be avoided if it is at all possible to do so.

Fortunately, according to the contextualist, there is another way
out. The contextualist's recommendation is (v) that we deny that
SA's conclusion really does threaten our intuitive
anti-skepticism. According to EC, recall, the proposition expressed by
a given knowledge utterance crucially depends upon
‘context’. So if, in general, a token of ‘S
knows that p’ is true just in case the subject has a
true belief and is in a strong epistemic position, there are variable
standards governing just how strong the subject's
epistemic position must be in order for the tokened sentence to express
a truth.

In its general form, the contextualist's solution to SA
involves claiming that there is something about SA, or the
possibilities it involves, which effects or reflects a shift in
context, such that there is a corresponding dramatic upwards shift in
the operative standards. Those standards are not epistemic in the
strict sense, of course, since they do not concern knowledge per
se; but they do affect what it takes for a given tokening of a
sentence of the form ‘S knows that p’ to
express a truth.

Thus an utterance of P1, such as occurs in SA, expresses a truth
only because, owing to the introduction of a high-standards context,
what it expresses is that the subject does not stand in an
extraordinarily strong epistemic position with regard to the
proposition that he has hands. But that, of course, is
compatible with his meeting lower, though still perhaps quite
demanding, standards, such as those in play in more ordinary contexts.
As DeRose puts it:

…the fact that the skeptic can…install very
high standards which we don't live up to has no tendency to show
that we don't satisfy the more relaxed standards that are in
place in ordinary conversations. Thus…our ordinary claims to
know [are] safeguarded from the apparently powerful attacks of the
skeptic, while, at the same time, the persuasiveness of the skeptical
arguments is explained. (DeRose 1992, 917)

Of course, the latter is explained only if we have, in addition, an
explanation as to why we thought that the skeptic's
claims threatened our ordinary claims to know. After all, it is only
because we thought this that SA posed a problem to which
contextualism, or any of (i)-(iii), is intended to be a solution. The
contextualist seeks to explain why we might think this—more
generally, why we might think that what is said in a given ‘high
stakes’ case is in fact compatible with what is said in its
‘low stakes’ counterpart—as follows:

According to the contextualist treatment of the skeptical
paradox, competent speakers can fail to be aware of these
context-sensitive standards, at least explicitly, and so fail to
distinguish between the standards that apply in skeptical contexts, and
the standards that apply in everyday contexts. This misleads them into
thinking that certain knowledge ascriptions conflict, when they are in
fact compatible. Contextualism thus combines a contextualist semantics
for knowledge ascriptions with a kind of error theory—a claim
that competent speakers are systematically misled by the contextualist
semantics. (Cohen 1999, 77; 2005a, 60; DeRose 1995, 40–41; 1999,
194; 2004b, 37).

While the general form of the preceding response to skeptical
arguments such as SA is widely accepted among contextualists, different
proponents of EC have proposed different specific versions of the view,
and so explanations of what is going on in such arguments which differ
in their details.

Thus, Robert Nozick (1981) is well-known for proposing that
knowledge requires what is come to be known as ‘sensitive
belief’, where one's belief that p is sensitive
just in case, if p were not the case, one would not believe
that p. While he does not endorse sensitivity as a general
condition on knowing, and while he is not concerned with giving an
analysis of knowledge itself, Keith DeRose offers the following
“Rule of Sensitivity”:

When it is asserted that some subject S knows (or does not
know) some proposition P, the standards for knowledge (the standards of
how good an epistemic position one must be in to count as knowing) tend
to be raised, if need be, to such a level as to require S's
belief in that particular P to be sensitive for it to count as
knowledge. (DeRose 1995, 36)

So, any particular utterance of “S knows that
p” will be true only if S believes that
p, p, and S's epistemic position is such
that his belief that p is sensitive. And for propositions
such as, “I'm not a bodiless brain in a vat (a BIV),” the
mere uttering of P1 (e.g.) induces very high standards for
knowledge, as the belief that I'm not a BIV is manifestly
insensitive; and at those very high standards, P1 is true. As
for P2, DeRose claims that it is true “regardless of what
epistemic standard it is evaluated at, so its plausibility is easily
accounted for” (ibid., 39). As it happens, though, in
SA P2 is being evaluated at fairly high standards; for those standards
are the ones put into play by the mentioning of P1. But this just
means that the only reading on which SA's conclusion is true is at the
unusually inflated standards induced by SA's first premise.

DeRose's brand of EC is ‘externalist’, in the
sense that it focuses on features —‘truth tracking’,
as some have called it—which are at center stage in externalist
theories of knowledge (/justification). Likewise externalist is Mark
Heller's brand of contextualism, which can be understood as both
reliabilist in spirit and an instance of the RA approach. On
Heller's view (1995), just how reliable a belief-forming
process must be for an attribution of knowledge to the subject to be
correct depends upon context, in the attributor sense introduced above.
And this in turn provides an answer to the question of just which
alternatives to what is believed are relevant: they are those such
that, if the process in question is reliable to the contextually
required degree, the subject will be able to discriminate between them
and what is in fact the case.

While sometimes, like Heller's, framed in RA
terms,[8]
Stewart Cohen's version
of EC is ‘internalistic’. According to Cohen (1986, 1987,
1988, 1999, 2005a-b) ‘knowledge’ inherits its
“indexical” nature (1988, 97) from that of ‘(is)
justified’. Justification, of course, comes in degrees; and what
counts as justification simpliciter—i.e., justification to
the level required for an attribution of knowledge to express a
truth—is governed by a ‘rule of salience’ (1998, 292, n. 11), whereby one's
evidence/reasons must be good enough to preclude salient possibilities
of error. What the skeptic does is make salient certain not-p
possibilities (e.g., the BIV hypothesis), with the result that the
standard(s) of how good one's reasons must be in order for one to
be justified in believing that one has hands, say, goes way
up. So, whereas DeRose's Rule of Sensitivity deals with how
far out into the space of possible worlds one must be able to
‘track the truth’, insofar as he locates the relevant
standards in terms of the strength or goodness of the subject's
reasons or evidence, Cohen's is an ‘internalist’
brand of contextualism.

Similar to Cohen's rule of salience is David Lewis'
(1996) “rule of attention”, which is the mechanism that he
takes to underlie the power of skeptical arguments. According to
Lewis:

What justifies Lewis' “equivalently” here? The
(alleged) fact that “every” is restricted to a particular
conversational domain (ibid., 553–554). Thus, Lewis thinks,
certain not -p possibilities will be “properly
ignored” in any given situation—they will not be within the
scope of the second “every” in the passage just quoted. As
to what determines whether a given possibility is ‘properly
ignored’, Lewis suggests a number of rules. “The Rule of
Attention,” which Lewis regards as “more a triviality than
a rule,” has it that “a possibility that is not ignored is
ipso facto not properly ignored” (559). And
this is why the skeptic's argument is so irresistible,
as Lewis sees it. For skepticism—indeed, epistemology
generally—just is the making salient of certain possibilities of
error. To ask, for example, whether we know that we are not BIVs, as
assessing the first premise of SA requires, is ipso facto not
to ignore that possibility. And it is natural to think that one's
putative evidence that one is not a BIV does not eliminate
that possibility. That indeed, is why the possibility that one is a BIV
is among the skeptical possibilities singled out by philosophers for
attention. So we do in fact have lots of knowledge, according to Lewis,
but it is ‘elusive’: “Examine it, and straight-way it
vanishes” (ibid., 560).

….S knows that P iff S's evidence
eliminates every possibility in which not-P—Psst!—except
for those possibilities that we are properly
ignoring. That ‘psst’ marks an attempt to do the
impossible—to mention that which remains unmentioned.
(Ibid.,
566)[9]

Recently, Michael Blome-Tillman (2009) has proposed an important
modification to Lewis' view. Specifically, Blome-Tillman recommends
that Lewis' ‘rule of attention’ be replaced by the
following ‘Rule of Presupposition’:

If w is compatible with the speakers' pragmatic presuppositions
in C, then w cannot be properly ignored
in C. (2009, 256)

Here, ‘pragmatic presupposition’ is to be understood along
the lines suggested by Stalnaker (1974, 2002). As stated by
Blome-Tillman,

x pragmatically presupposes p in C
[iff] x is disposed to behave, in her use of language,
as if she believed p to be common ground
in C. (Ibid.))

Blome-Tillman regards the resultant Presuppositional Epistemic
Contextualism to be superior to more familiar views (including
Lewis'), not least because it allows that the mere mentioning
or thinking of a skeptical possibility needn't make a
difference to the contents and truth-values of a given knowledge
claim—whether it does so depends on whether it effects or reflects,
which it need not do, a shift in the pragmatic presuppositions of the
parties involved.

Still other versions of EC takes the shifting standards to directly
govern ascriptions of evidence. In Robert Hambourger's variant of
this form of EC, it is “the amount of evidence needed to
know a proposition” which “varies with standards of
caution;” further, he claims “that the amount needed to
know a proposition under any given standard is just that needed to be
epistemically justified in claiming to know it” (1987, 260,
emphasis added). According to Ram Neta, it is not so much the
quantity of evidence required for a truthful utterance of
‘S knows that p’ that is governed by
context-sensitive standards, but rather whether certain mental states
of the subject's count as evidence at all. The relevant
rule here once again bears certain similarities to those proposed by
Cohen and Lewis:

(R) When one raises an hypothesis H that is an uneliminated
counterpossibility with respect to S's knowing that
p at t, one restricts what counts in one's context
of appraisal… as S's body of evidence at t to
just those mental states that S has, and would have, at
t whether or not H is true.… (2002, 674; 2003a,
23–4)

By exploiting this rule, the skeptic is able to disqualify certain
mental states—e.g., those involved in my current experience
(as) of seeing my hands—as constituting evidence for my belief
that I have hands. Although, once again, when the relevant skeptical
possibilities are not raised (as they typically aren't), those
experiences qualify (as they typically do) as evidence sufficient for
truthful ascriptions of such “knowledge” to me.

Finally, some theorists have suggested that the context-sensitivity of
sentences involving ‘knows’ is owing to a more general
context-sensitivity in certain explanatory relations and claims. Thus,
for example, Steven Rieber (1998) has proposed that, in general,
S knows that P iff “the fact that Pexplains why S believes that P” (1998, 194). According
to Rieber, however, explanations are always at least implicitly
contrastive, and whether one thing explains another will depends upon
which contrasts are
salient.[10]
As just presented,
Rieber's theory concerns the knowledge relation itself; so, in
the terminology of Section 1, it would qualify as a
‘substantive’ contextualist view. But Rieber's is
clearly better construed as a semantic theory, like the other views
just sketched. For, as applied to SA, it would have the consequence
that what the conclusion of that argument actually says is:

(C′) It is not the case that my having hands rather than my
being a handless BIV explains why I believe that I have hands rather
than that I'm a handless
BIV.[11]

Whereas, that I am a handless BIV is not ordinarily a salient
counter-possibility to my having hands—though perhaps my
having had my hands amputated and replaced with prostheses after a bad
car accident, e.g., is. So the truth of C′ is
compatible with my ordinary claim to know, since the latter might
strictly express the proposition that My having hands rather than
my having had my hands amputated and replaced with prostheses is what
explains why I believe that I have hands rather than that I've had my
hands amputated and replaced with prostheses. Once again, then,
armed with the correct contextualist semantics for the relevant
claims, we can see that the conclusion of SA may be true, but that,
contrary to appearances, that conclusion is not incompatible with a
typical claim to know various mundane matters of fact.

Another version of EC that features explanatory relations and claims
is John Greco's (2003, 2008, 2009). At the heart of Greco's view is a
certain picture of knowledge—that it is a kind of ‘success
through ability’. Knowledge is, on this account, creditable true
belief; when one knows, one believes the truth as a result of one's
own efforts and abilities. Of course, knowing also requires
that one's circumstances be favorable to the exercise of one's
abilities. So too, if one is to know, the ability(/-ies) in question
must be involved in the right way with the production of a true
belief—it can't be a matter of luck that one's abilities, exercised
in the right kind of circumstances, issue in truth. But what counts as
a (true) belief's being produced ‘in the right way’ by
one's efforts and abilities? More generally, when is the attainment of
a true belief genuinely creditable to the agent? It is here that
contextual matters enter in. For, in general, there can be
different—though, importantly, non-competing—accounts of
'‘he cause’ of a given thing, event or phenomenon. (For an
insurance claims adjuster, that John wasn't driving on winter
tires might be what explains his having gotten into a car accident
on a snowy day; for the concerned tax-payer, that the city fails
to properly maintain its roads in wintertime might be singled out
as “the cause” of this same event; and it can seem that, considered in
their respective contexts, each of these claims might be correct.) And
now we have an argument for EC: attributing knowledge involves giving
credit; credit attributions involve a kind of causal explanation; but
causal explanations require a contextualist semantics; so knowledge
attributions require a contextualist semantics too (2009, 107). (As
noted in Section 3.5 below, Greco also claims that the context shifts
he asserts have the advantage of accounting for the lack of knowledge
in Gettier cases.)

As the discussion of this section reveals, there is plenty of room
for variety among proponents of EC—both about, in Jonathan
Schaffer's (2005, 115) phrase, “which epistemic gear the
wheels of context turn,” and about the exact mechanism or rule
which governs such shifts. Once again, however, there is a strong
degree of consensus among the theories under discussion that context
itself is to be understood in terms of such things as the interests,
purposes, expectations, and so forth, of the knowledge attributor.
Further, there is of course consensus among these theorists that,
understood along those lines, context affects the truth-conditional
content of knowledge sentences—and, in fact, that this
phenomenon is what underlies and explains the power of skeptical
arguments, even though it also reveals why those arguments do not
threaten our ordinary claims to know. For on all such views, it is only
by effecting shifts in the epistemic standards, and so in what the
relevant claims express, that the skeptic is able to truthfully state
his view.

Of course, as some proponents of EC point out, contextualists are
not forced to any view as to whether and/or under what circumstances,
exactly, the skeptic does succeed in raising the standards (Cohen 2001,
92–93; 2005, 58–59; DeRose 2006, Section 6 and 2004a). Still, that EC
promises to provide a plausible response to skeptical puzzles has been
among its primary ‘selling points’. So, in this sense, the
contextualist stands to lose something if it in fact turns out that the
skeptic is only very rarely or never able to raise
the standards for a knowledge-ascribing sentence to express a truth.
For then some other account would be required to explain the apparent
power of arguments like SA.

While proponents of EC have made much of the fact that their view
promises a novel and appealing resolution of skeptical puzzles like SA,
contextualists have also emphasized what they regard as EC's
consonance with our ordinary knowledge-attributing practices. For there
too, they say, we find evidence of the very same sort of
context-sensitivity which skeptical arguments are actually exploiting.
As Hookway puts the general claim: “Whether I can correctly claim
knowledge appears to be relative to the purposes underlying the
conversations to which I am contributing” (1996, 1).

For a couple of reasons, it is very important not to overlook the
appeal to everyday cases—that is, not to restrict ourselves to
a consideration of apparently inconsistent knowledge claims where one
of these claims arises in a clearly skeptical context. First, as we
will see, a number of philosophers have questioned just how effective
EC is in its response to skepticism; and if they are right about this,
then it matters a great deal that the effectiveness of that response is
not EC's sole basis. Second, as Keith DeRose says, “the
contextualist's appeal to varying standards for knowledge in his
solution to skepticism would rightly seem unmotivated and ad hoc
if we didn't have independent reason from
non-philosophical talk to think such shifts in the content of knowledge
attributions occur” (2002, 169). But in fact, DeRose says,
“The best grounds for accepting contextualism concerning
knowledge attributions come from how knowledge-attributing (and
knowledge-denying) sentences are used in ordinary, non-philosophical
talk: What ordinary speakers will count as ‘knowledge’ in
some non-philosophical contexts they will deny is such in others”
(2005, 172; 2006, 316). Likewise, Cohen claims that examples such as
the following “strongly [suggest] that ascriptions of knowledge
are context-sensitive” (1999,
59):[12]

Mary and John are at the L.A. airport contemplating taking a
certain flight to New York. They want to know whether the flight has a
layover in Chicago. They overhear someone ask a passenger Smith if he
knows whether the flight stops in Chicago. Smith looks at the flight
itinerary he got from the travel agent and respond, ‘Yes I
know—it does stop in Chicago.’ It turns out that Mary and John
have a very important business contact they have to make at the Chicago
airport. Mary says, ‘How reliable is that itinerary? It could
contain a misprint. They could have changed the schedule at the last
minute.’ Mary and John agree that Smith doesn't really
know that the plane will stop in Chicago. They decide to check
with the airline agent. (Ibid., 58)

Once again, as with their skeptical counterparts, contextualists
claim that regarding the truth conditions of sentences used in
attributing/denying knowledge as depending on context makes best sense
of the flexibility in our knowledge-attributing behaviour. While, as we
have seen, different specific version of EC are possible,
contextualists tend to agree that, in everyday cases, such as
that just described, the practical importance of the subjects'
‘getting it right’ tends to raise the standards for the
truth of a sentence of the form ‘S knows that
p’. (Keep in mind, though, a point stressed in Section
2: namely, that just what an utterance of such a sentence expresses
changes, in the ‘high stakes’ case, to some more demanding
proposition—we do not have a fixed such proposition, with
different standards for its truth applying in the more
demanding context.) The result is that the knowledge denial (Mary and
John's claim) in the high-stakes situation may be true, without
affecting the truth of the low stakes claim to know (by Smith himself).
What reason is there, though, for adopting this way of resolving the
apparent incompatibility between the two knowledge utterances?

Well, it is important that the low-stakes claim be true, since that
preserves our intuitive anti-skepticism—the thought that we
do know many things: if you cannot know on the basis of
ordinary, non-entailing evidence such as what is printed in the flight
itinerary (which neither we nor Smith have any reason to think is
erroneous), then we will have to deny very many of our ordinary claims
to know (Ibid., 59). But, it is argued, the ‘high
stakes’ knowledge denial seems right too—that is
why the relevant (paired) cases constitute a puzzle and deserve
philosophical attention. And contextualism allows us to preserve the
sense that in such cases each of the two speakers is speaking
‘properly’, and “the presumption that what is
properly said is true” (DeRose 2005, Section 4). Whereas, if we
take John and Mary's stricter standard to be too
demanding—if their denial of knowledge to Smith is
false—then, not only must we reject the feeling that what they are
saying is in some sense correct, but it is “hard to see how Mary
and John should describe their situation”:

Certainly they are being prudent in refusing to rely on the
itinerary. They have a very important meeting in Chicago. Yet if Smith
knows on the basis of the itinerary that the flight stops in Chicago,
what should they have said? ‘Okay, Smith knows that the
flight stops in Chicago, but still, we need to check further.’ To
my ear, it is hard to make sense of that claim. (Cohen 1999,
58–9)

But we can bypass having to make sense of such claims, and having to
explain why we mistakenly thought that what Mary and John were saying
was correct, if we accept EC: in everyday no less than skeptical
contexts, the sentences used by someone in a ‘high-stakes’
context (here, John and Mary) and his ‘low stakes’
counterpart (Smith) can both be true, since they are (in some
cases
anyway[13])
made in different
contexts, and the propositions they express are not really conflicting
after all.

In short, contextualism promises to deliver up a nice symmetry
between the flexibility in our (alleged) judgments as to the truth of a
given knowledge claim/denial, on the one hand, and a parallel
plasticity in the truth conditions (and hence the truth
values) of the knowledge-attributing sentences we are in fact
prepared to utter. And on the assumption that speakers realize, however
tacitly, that what is expressed by an utterance of “S
knows (/doesn't know) that p” is a
context-sensitive matter, the contextualist can invoke this to explain
the observed tendency to attribute/deny knowledge, depending on such
things as “the purposes, intentions, expectations,
presuppositions, etc., of the speakers who utter these sentences”
(Cohen 1999: 57), even though everything about the subject, his/her
worldly situation and history, and so on, remains quite fixed.

There are some knowledge claims (/denials) which, though they
concern everyday matters, rather than unrealistic skeptical ones, can
seem to threaten skeptical consequences. As we saw, the perhaps-natural
denial of knowledge to Smith, in the preceding example, is like this. A
more familiar example is ‘the lottery paradox’. Thus, while
the probability of holding the winning ticket in a (fair) lottery may
be vanishingly small (assuming there are very many tickets, etc), many
balk at crediting any given ticket-holder with knowledge that their
ticket is not the winner. But why should that be if, as fallibilism
about knowledge has it, one does not need evidence that guarantees the
truth of a belief in order to know?

Several contextualists (e.g., Cohen 1988, 1998; Lewis 1996; Neta
2002; Rieber 1998) have suggested that we can resolve the lottery
paradox by means of the same device(s) used to explain both skeptical
paradoxes and seeming inconsistencies among everyday
knowledge
attributions:[14]
in brief, we
are reluctant to attribute knowledge to the subject in the lottery case
just because the possibility of error has been made salient; but if we
are, instead, focusing on the vast improbability of his ticket's
being the winner, that he does know that he'll lose can
seem like the right thing to say; and, as above, EC enables us regard
both the relevant claims as expressing truths, albeit in different
contexts.

Some contextualists again—notably Lewis (1996) and Greco
(2003, 2009)—have assayed extending EC to the Gettier problem
as well (on the latter, see Steup 2006, Section 2). But this remains a
much more controversial move among proponents of EC. (See, e.g., Cohen
1998 and Heller 1999 for criticisms of Lewis on this score.)

Further, there is some disagreement among contextualists as to the
status of the closure principle for knowledge, mentioned in Section 3.1
above, in connection with SA. The majority view is that closure should
be preserved (Mark Heller is the notable exception; see note #7,
below), but also—of course, given EC—that it should be seen as
holding only within a given context, on pain of equivocation.
As such disagreement illustrates, what one makes of closure and of EC
are orthogonal issues—even if one prefers EC in an RA guise.
Each of EC, closure, and RA, then, may be endorsed without taking a
stand on either of the remaining issues.

Finally, while the differences among particular versions of EC are
can be significant, they tend to recede into the background in critical
discussions of contextualism. Objections to EC either (a) deny that EC
really has the advantages that have been claimed for it, (b) assert
that EC has certain problematic features or consequences, and/or (c)
allege that EC does not in fact constitute the best response to the
data which are supposed to motivate it. And, to a very great extent,
such objections to EC are directed towards the central contextualist
thesis per se and so are independent of the details of any
particular contextualist theory.

Among the objections to EC which have been made, some are more
easily dealt with by the contextualist than others. Thus, for instance,
Fred Dretske objects to the contextualist's response to skeptical
problems as follows:

Skepticism, as a doctrine about what ordinary people know,
cannot be made true by being put in the mouth of a skeptic.
Treating knowledge as an indexical…[, however,] seems to have,
or to come dangerously close to having, exactly this result. For this
reason (among others) I reject it. (Dretske 1991, 192)

To this, however, the contextualist can reply that it is incorrect
to say that EC, even where it allows the skeptic to successfully state
some truth in uttering ‘You don't know that
p’, thereby makes it easy for skepticism to be
true. To suppose that requires assuming that knowledge sentences do not
have context-sensitive contents—hence that skeptic's
denials are true at the expense of the truth of our ordinary
claims to know. But, of course, that this is not so is the idea at the
heart of the contextualist's treatment of SA. (As we will see
presently, there is another way of construing Dretske's
objection, whereby it does not misfire in this way.)

For a second objection to EC that is not terribly effective,
consider Palle Yourgrau's contention that, if true, EC would
license some rather bizarre dialogues, such as the following:

A: Is that a zebra?

B: Yes, it is a zebra.

A: But can you rule out its being merely a cleverly painted
mule?

B: No, I cannot.

A: So, you admit you didn't know it was a zebra?

B: No, I did know then that it was a zebra. But
after your question, I no longer know. (1983, 183)

That EC licenses such bizarre dialogues, however, is hardly clear.
For, once the skeptical possibility is raised, the relevant knowledge
claim no longer expresses something that is true (DeRose 1992). Recall,
after all, as was stressed above, that EC is a semantic
thesis—it does not concern knowledge at all. Suppose that, prior to
the skeptical possibility's having been raised, B had claimed to
know that there is or was a zebra before him. Suppose that B, in making
this claim, expressed a true proposition; that he did so does not imply
that B knows, or knew, full stop. Supposing that it does requires an
illicit descent into the object language (DeRose 2000).

According to Keith DeRose (ibid., Section 6), what EC does
license, in terms of legitimate ways for B to close out the dialogue,
are only metalinguistic claims like:

I was previously such that an utterance of ‘B knows it
is a zebra’ would have expressed a true proposition, but the
different and more demanding proposition which such an utterance would
now express would not be true.

Nikola Kompa (2002, 5) has observed that EC would also seemingly
permit B to say,

Had I uttered ‘I know it is a zebra’
earlier, I would thereby have expressed a truth, but I do not know that
it is a zebra.

Kompa calls this “an unpleasant consequence” of EC. And
one might similarly regard claims in which there is explicit
relativization of ‘knows’ to the relevant standards, as
in,

I knowS1 that it is a zebra, but I don't
knowS2 that it is a zebra.

As Kent Bach (2005, 58–61) says, there seems to be nothing in EC
that precludes the legitimacy of such claims. After all, they merely
involve making explicit what are, according to EC, the propositions
expressed by the relevant utterances. But the contextualist may reply
that any unpleasantness or feeling of unfamiliarity attending such
claims derives from our failing to be fully aware of the
context-sensitivity of the expressions in question. (Compare how Cohen
(2001, 89) responds to a certain objection of Feldman's (2001,
77).) Whether this sort of error theory is problematic is a separate
issue, discussed below.

In any case, the non-skeptical contextualist can further say that it
is only because he engages in such an illegitimate descent into the
object language—speaking of knowledge, as opposed to the
propositions expressed in uttering “knowledge” sentences —
that David Lewis is able to say such apparently dramatic and troubling
things as that, once certain skeptical possibilities are made salient,
‘knowledge vanishes’ (1996, 560; see Bach 2005, 54–55, and
DeRose 2000).

While reminders that EC is a semantic or meta-linguistic thesis
helps both to defuse objections like Dretske's and
Yourgrau's and to expose as misleading Lewisian presentations of
the view, it sets the stage for a more difficult objection for
contextualists to counter: namely, that it does not provide a
satisfactory resolution of certain skeptical problems. Various specific
versions of this objection have been lodged, with varying degrees of
forcefulness (by, e.g., Feldman 1999, 2001, 2004; Klein 2000, 2005;
Kornblith 2000; Sosa 2000; Bach 2005), but they have in common the idea
that EC, just because it is a semantic or meta-linguistic thesis, fails
to successfully engage and respond to skepticism.

On one version of this complaint (e.g., Conee 2005, Feldman 2001), it
is said that EC per se does not generate the results
essential to the contextualist resolution of SA, for example. That the
propositions expressed by utterances of knowledge sentences in
ordinary contexts are true, for example, is not secured by EC
on its own, nor is the truth of skeptical propositions expressed in
contexts where skeptics assert them; only substantive theory can
secure either result. On another version, the objection is simply that
EC does not correctly characterize the skeptic's position at all. As
we have seen, EC has it that skeptical claims express truths only
relative to extraordinarily high epistemic standards. But surely, the
objection runs, what is at issue between skeptics and non-skeptics is
whether we satisfy even our ordinary epistemic standards. In Hilary
Kornblith's terms, it is the ‘Full-Blooded’, rather than
the merely ‘High Standards’, skeptic “who is making
an historically important and philosophically interesting claim”
(2000, 27). Feldman puts it thus:

The debate about skepticism is…not as a debate in
which the quality of our evidence is agreed to and the debate results
from differing views about what the standards for knowledge are.
Instead, it is a debate about how good our evidence is. Understood that
way, it is difficult to see the epistemological significance of
decisions about which standards are associated with the word
‘knows’ in any particular context. Contextualism is, from
this perspective, skepticism neutral, in that it does not address this
part of the issue. (Feldman 2004, 32; cf. Feldman 1999,
2001)

And while he, like Peter Klein (2000, 2005), is prepared to grant
the contextualist his/her semantic thesis, Ernest Sosa (2000) likewise
takes it to have limited relevance to epistemology generally —
though, as he sees it, this is often overlooked, owing to
“incautious and faulty formulations of the view” (2000, 9).
For, just because it is restricted to certain meta-linguistic claims,
EC has only limited significance for skepticism: from the fact that, in
non-skeptical contexts, we can use ‘S knows that
p’ to express propositions which are true, nothing
follows about whether we know anything—a question
which we can and do wonder about in philosophical contexts. But in
fact, one might suppose that the proponent of EC would disavow the
meaningfulness of the latter question, if it is intended to be one
which admits of some acontextual answer.

Several proponents of EC have offered replies to the charge that EC
does not fairly characterize and/or engage with skepticism. While
allowing that the complaint may apply to other forms of EC, Neta claims
that, on his version, the skeptic “is not making the
uninteresting claim that we do not meet unusually stringent standards
of knowledge. Rather, she is claiming that we do not meet ordinary
standards for knowledge” (2003b, 2). In reply, however, the
objector may press that, as Neta says, and as we saw above, the skeptic
is able to do this on his view only because she “disqualif[ies]
certain mental states from counting as evidence”
(ibid.). And one might think that that constitutes
the imposition of unusually high epistemic standards, even if they do
not directly govern the proper use of ‘knows’ per
se.

Responding to Sosa (2000), Cohen (1999, 79–80) writes that, by his
lights, what is troubling about skepticism is the claim that, in saying
things of the form, “S knows that p”, we
have all along been expressing falsehoods (cf. DeRose 2004b, 37). The
point of EC is not to show that we know, or even that our ordinary
knowledge claims express true propositions; it is, rather, to reconcile
the presumed truth of such claims with the apparent truth of the
premises of SA (Cohen 2001, 95–96; DeRose 1995 characterizes the
problem posed by SA in very similar terms). And EC shows us how we
might do so. But, Sosa counters, insofar as non-skeptics wish to
preserve and defend a “Moorean stance”, the latter is
not a metalinguistic claim to the effect that folks in ordinary
situations who claim to “know” some matter of fact often
express truths. Rather, the latter “is a stance, adopted in a
philosophical context, about what one then knows and, by extension,
what people ordinarily know. At a minimum it is a stance about whether
people are right in their ordinary claims to know, which is not quite
the same as whether they are right in their ordinary utterances of the
form ‘I know that p’.” So once we abandon
the metalanguage, as a proper understanding of EC requires, “we
abandon thereby the Moorean stance” (Sosa 2004, 281).

This last claim of Sosa's concerning skepticism, considered as
a position arising within a philosophical context, leads naturally to a
related, though distinct, worry about the contextualist's
response thereto. There seems to be a good sense in which, when
epistemologists carefully consider and debate about the extent of our
knowledge, the cogency (or not) of various skeptical arguments, and so
on, they occupy a single, shared context (Conee 2005, 53). Within that
context, some deny that we know very much,
while their anti-skeptical counterparts insist that we do. But, the
complaint runs, to hold, as EC's proffered handling of SA
implies, that in this context it is the skeptic's claims
that are true is not licensed by EC itself: the propositions expressed
by knowledge sentences may be contextually variable in the way EC
alleges, but that does not tell us which specific such
sentences are true, and which false. (It is possible to read
Dretske's objection to EC, mentioned in the previous Section, as
intended to make essentially this point.)

In response, the contextualist may deny that there is, in fact, a
single, shared context governing (or constituted by) serious
epistemological discussion. (DeRose's 2004a is an extended
discussion of just this topic; see too Cohen 2005, 59–60.) So too, she
may grant—which, as noted above (Section 3.3), some proponents
of EC readily do—that contextualists as such are not forced to any
view as to whether and/or under what circumstances the skeptic's
claims do express truths, while still insisting that EC provides at
least the basis for a resolution of puzzles like SA—a
resolution which, overall, is preferable to competing accounts (Cohen
2005a, 58–60). Of course, such moves may in turn give rise to further
worries—about the first, whether, for example, it would
generalize, threatening to dissolve all apparently substantive
disagreements among specialists; about the second, whether, in the end,
EC itself is even a necessary part of an adequate response to the
skeptic (cf. Brady and Pritchard 2005,
165).[15]

Clearly, the effectiveness of EC in addressing and resolving
skeptical problems is far from settled. It would appear, however, that
one's verdict on this matter—hence, one's view as
to whether EC's handling of the skeptical problem constitutes a
reason to accept EC—will depend in no small part upon just what
one takes the problem posed by skepticism to be, as well as upon facts
about particular contextualist views which go beyond an endorsement of
EC per se.

One of the major attractions of EC is said to be that it enables the
resolution of certain apparent conflicts among sets of individually
plausible claims without forcing us to reject any of the members
thereof as
false.[16]
As Crispin Wright puts it, a
good part of the appeal of EC is that it seems to enable a certain
“‘no-fault’ view of certain (potentially)
intransigent disputes where we have to hand no ready conception of a
further fact which would make one party right at the expense of the
other” (2005, 240).

However, as we saw above, whether it is a skeptical argument or a
pedestrian case that is at issue, contextualists are committed to a
certain ‘error theory’. After all, that EC is correct is
supposed to be a quite recent discovery. Further, in those cases in
which speakers' claims about who does/doesn't know are said
by the contextualist not to conflict, among many there persists the
sense that they are cannot both be speaking truly. For
instance, our ordinary claims to know various things seem to
conflict with the skeptic's denial that we know any such
things—that is why skepticism has seemed to pose a problem to which
contextualism is said to constitute a novel solution. The contextualist
seeks to explain why we might think this—more generally, why we
might think that what is said in a given ‘high stakes’ case
is in fact compatible with what is said in its ‘low stakes’
counterpart—by suggesting that we fail to fully appreciate the
contextualist semantics and/or to faithfully track shifts in context
(see, e.g.: Cohen 1999, 77; 2005a, 60; cf. DeRose 1999, 194; 1995,
40–41; 2004b, 37).

According to another often-voiced objection to EC (in, e.g.,
Schiffer 1996, Hofweber 1999, Rysiew 2001, Hawthorne 2004, Conee 2005,
Williamson 2005a, Egan et al. 2005), its error theory is
problematic. As formulated by Stephen Schiffer, the objection is simply
that it is implausible that we would get “bamboozled by our own
words” (ibid., 329) in the way the contextualist
alleges, since “speakers would know what they were saying if
knowledge sentences were indexical in the way the Contextualist
requires” (ibid.: 328).

Is this a good objection? On the face of it, the complaint may seem
not to have any weight. With respect to SA above, for example, the two
premises are individually quite plausible, the argument
appears valid, yet the conclusion seems very implausible. So
“something plausible has to go” (DeRose 1995, 2;
emphasis added). Thus, that EC is not an entirely ‘no
fault’ view might mean that, as Timothy Williamson has argued
(2005b, Section II), considerations of charity per se do not
favor it; but why think that the contextualist's error theory is
particularly problematic?

This is one of the ways in which Cohen has very lately responded to
concerns about contextualism's error theory (2005a,
70).[17]
And in a recent paper (2006)
DeRose replies along similar lines: if you present a group of subjects
with SA, for instance, and ask them whether the conclusion contradicts
an ordinary claim to know such a thing, some will say
‘yes’, and some will say ‘no’. If contextualism
turns out to be true, then many are blind to that, and so on.
So, whoever turns out to be right, the contextualist or the
‘invariantist’, a substantial portion of ordinary speakers
are afflicted by “semantic blindness” (Hawthorne 2004,
107). ‘Bamboozlement’ is something we are stuck with either
way.

In assessing this type of response to the objection under
consideration, it is useful to separate out two questions: First,
whether, considered on its own, the contextualist's error theory
is plausible. Second, whether that theory raises any problems internal
to the contextualist view.

As to the first question, there are precedents for the type
of error that the contextualist says is going on with respect to at
least some of our knowledge attributions. For example, by implicitly
raising the standards—drawing attention to previously
disregarded bumps, etc.—you can get a competent speaker to take
seriousness ‘flatness skepticism’, the view that
nothing's really flat (Cohen 1999, 78–9; 2005a, 60, 70; 2004,
193). But this can take place only because,

…although ascriptions of flatness are context-sensitive,
competent speakers can fail to realize this. And because they can fail
to realize this, they can mistakenly think that their reluctance to
ascribe flatness, in a context where the standards are at the extreme,
conflicts with their ascriptions of flatness in everyday contexts.
(Cohen 2001, 91; 1999, 79)

However, when an apparent incompatibility between certain uttered
sentences is actually due to their expressing different propositions in
different contexts, once we see that this is so, any appearance that
they are incompatible tends to go away. Thus, we might
‘disagree’ over whether Kansas is flat, but once it is made
clear that you mean relatively un-mountainous and I mean
devoid of any hills at all, we quickly agree that we were both
right all along. But for many, this does not happen when they are
presented with the proposed contextualist resolution to the problem
cases which motivate it (Conee 2005, 55, 66; Feldman 2001, 73, 77–78;
Rysiew 2001, 484–485).

Acknowledging this difference in the readiness with which people
accept EC, as opposed to a corresponding view about ascriptions of
flatness, Cohen notes that we already know that there are
“varying degrees to which competent speakers are blind to the
context-sensitivity in the language” (2005a, 61). The
context-sensitivity of indexicals like ‘I’ and
‘now’ are easy to spot, that of ‘flat’ somewhat
harder. And for ‘knows’, “it may be very difficult
even after some amount of reflection for competent speakers to accept
context-sensitivity. It may take subtle philosophical considerations
concerning the best way to resolve a paradox in order to
‘see’ the context-sensitivity of ‘knows’”
(ibid.).

Bolstering the latter suggestion are cases involving what Thomas
Hofweber (1999, 98ff.) calls ‘hidden relativity’. For
example, according to Hofweber, our claim that August is a summer month
presumes that we are in the Northern
hemisphere.[18]
A speaker may not be aware of
this, though; and even those who are aware of it do not feel
compelled to make that parameter explicit whenever they utter the
relevant sort of sentence. So, when Schiffer says, “no ordinary
person would dream of telling you that what he meant and was implicitly
stating was that he knew that p relative to such-and-such
standard” (1996, 326ff.), that in itself does not show
that no such relativization is, in fact, required or even in place. If
you ask someone what they meant in saying “August is a summer
month,” they are liable simply to repeat what they've just
said!

It is not clear, however, whether such ‘hidden
relativities’ really do provide a model for our supposed
ignorance of the context-sensitivity of knowledge sentences. For, while
many competent speakers of English are unaware of the (supposed)
relativity of ‘summer month’, once they are made aware of
this relativity, they do not actively resist its being made
explicit. Whereas, when the alleged relativizations within knowledge
sentences are made explicit—“Smith doesn't
knowS that the flight stops in Chicago,” etc. (Bach
2005, Section I)—they are often met with resistance and
regarded as highlighting the controversial character of
EC.[19]

Further, as Hofweber says (1999, 101–2), with regard to
‘summer month’, say, there is a plausible explanation of
why the relativization in question can be ‘hidden’ for many
speakers and, even among those who are aware of it, rarely be made
explicit—namely, that most of the people with whom we discuss
such things are geographically close to us. Whereas, the
evidence for contextualism requires that there be some
interesting variation among the standards which determine a knowledge
sentence's truth-conditions within this or that ‘language
community’, and it requires that we be guided in our
everyday knowledge-attributing behavior by an awareness of just this
fact.

This last point brings out the second question concerning the
contextualist's error theory mentioned above—whether that
theory raises any problems internal to the contextualist view. For, to
the extent that the context-sensitivity of the relevant expression(s)
can remain deeply hidden, even after careful reflection, it becomes
less clear that in the cases of concern (SA, the airport example, etc.)
what is driving our judgments as to whether what speakers say is
‘true and proper’ is, as contextualist says, our awareness
of that context-sensitivity. The contextualist must thus strike
“a delicate balance” (Conee 2005, 54–55) between crediting
us with a grasp of the context-sensitivity of knowledge sentences,
while at the same time attributing to us a failure to fully
grasp it.

Finally, as Ram Neta observes, in Hofweber's cases it is some
worldly fact about the phenomenon in question of which people are
ignorant. Whereas,

…the contextualist does not want to say that our semantic
ignorance about our knowledge attributions results from our ignorance
of the real nature of knowledge. Rather, it is supposed to result from
our ignorance about the way in which the content of those attributions
depends upon contextual factors. (2003, 404)

And, as we have seen, far from referring to our worldly situation
and the nature of various phenomena therein, ‘context’ is
generally said by contextualists to refer to such things as the
purposes, intentions, expectations, presuppositions, etc., of the
speakers who utter those sentences. (The same sorts of things,
plausibly, which are responsible for determining what is expressed by
attributions of flatness, say.)

According to some (e.g., Rysiew 2001, 485, 507), this last point of
dissimilarity between Hofweber's ‘hidden
relativities’ and that which contextualists allege intensifies
concerns about the contextualist's error theory. For it
seems to imply a quite specific deficit in “our powers of
semantic self-knowledge” (Neta 2003, 408): to say that we
“conflate contexts” (Cohen 2005a, 69) is to say that we are
mixed up about what our intentions, purposes, etc., are when we
utter knowledge sentences. Now, we do know that that sort of thing
sometimes happens. (Neta—ibid., 407–408—describes one
such case.) Still, and whether or not it does constitute a deficit in
our “semantic self-knowledge”, it would be good if we had
some explanation as to why many have such a hard time coming
to terms with the truth of contextualism, when the context-sensitivity
of other terms is fairly easily accepted, and when we are said to grasp
that truth implicitly. Cohen has tentatively suggested that
considerations of value might explain this:

….We value justification and knowledge. But
contextualist theories are deflationary. Contextualism about knowledge
says that most of our everyday utterances of the form ‘S knows
P’ are true, even though the strength of epistemic position in
those instances does not meet our highest standards. In the same way,
contextualism about flatness says that most of our everyday utterances
of sentences of the form ‘X is flat’ are true, even though
X's surface may fall short of perfect flatness.

In other words, contextualism is a ‘good
news, bad news’ theory. The good news is that we have lots of
knowledge and many surfaces are flat; the bad news is that knowledge
and flatness are not all they were cracked up to be. We find this much
easier to accept in the case of flatness than knowledge, because
ascriptions of flatness do not have the normative force that
ascriptions of knowledge/justification do. (2005a, 61–2; cf.
2004, 193)

Whether one sees this suggested explanation as a step forward, it
should by now be clear that we have moved beyond considerations of the
contextualist's imputation of error to ordinary speakers per
se. While the issue of whether EC's error theory is
problematic remains a topic of lively debate, one thing that has
emerged from the discussion here is that, in spite of how it is
sometimes presented, that debate seems not to concern semantic
‘blindness’ or ‘bamboozlement’ itself. Rather,
it has to do with what is, according to some, the unsatisfactory or
troubling nature of the contextualist's appeal to such a theory
in particular.

According to EC, ‘know(s)’ is a context-sensitive
term. Among proponents of EC, however, there has been relatively
little discussion, and little agreement, about just what linguistic
model best captures this fact. Thus, Cohen (1988, 97) speaks of
‘knowledge’ as
“an
indexical”,[20]
Hambourger (1987, 262) likens it to “large”, Heller (1999a,
206; 1999b, 121) says that it is a vague term, and DeRose, while at one
point (1992, 920–921) using an analogy with the demonstrative
“this” to illuminate the lack of contradiction between
certain utterances of knowledge sentences, tends to be noncommittal as
to the appropriate model for ‘know(s)’.

It has been objected, however, that regardless of exactly which
model is adopted, the linguistic data surrounding ‘know(s)’
is not what one would expect were it a genuinely context-sensitive
term. For example, Jason Stanley (2004) argues that, unlike terms like
‘flat’ and ‘tall’, ‘knows’ is not
clearly gradable. Thus, it makes sense to describe someone as “very
tall”; but while I might say that someone knows something
“very well,” ‘very’ does not appear here to be
functioning as a degree modifier. And while ‘(is)
justified’ is obviously gradable, even if gradability were
sufficient for context-sensitivity, from the fact that knowledge
requires justification it would not follow that ‘knows’ is
context-sensitive as well (pace Cohen 1999, 60). Nor, Stanley
argues, does ‘know(s)’ behave like indexicals
(‘I’, ‘here’) or relational terms (such as
‘enemy’).

In a related argument—one that recalls some of the
discussion of the preceding Section—John Hawthorne points out that
with uncontroversially context-dependent terms, we find it very natural
to employ what he calls “the clarification technique”.—An
example from the previous section illustrates the point: I
balk at your claim that Kansas is flat, pointing out that there is a
small rise just ahead of us. Rather than admitting to a mistake
(‘concession’) or simply repeating your claim
(‘sticking to one's guns’), you clarify: “Well,
what I meant was that there are very few mountains.”
Hawthorne's point is that we have very few techniques of
clarification in the case of ‘know(s)’; whereas, it
“is through the clarification technique that sensitivity to
context-dependence is manifested” (2004, 104-106).

Finally, Herman Capellen and Ernie Lepore (2003) argue that,
according to certain tests for the genuine context-sensitivity of a
term, ‘know(s)’ just does not pass muster. (In their
discussion, examples like the one illustrating the “unpleasant
consequence” of EC mentioned in 4.1, above, loom large.)

Responses on behalf of EC to such arguments vary. Commenting on
Stanley, Barbara Partee (2004) agrees that ‘know(s)’ is
indeed unlike expressions such as ‘tall’, but that perhaps
better models are available. Nikola Kompa (2002) suggests that the
context-sensitivity of ‘know(s)’ is best understood as
deriving from a sui generis sort of
“unspecificity”. And Rob Stainton (2010), while
quite sympathetic to the claim that ‘know(s)’ is not itself
a context-sensitive term, nevertheless believes that the
“spirit” of EC can be saved: if there are pragmatic
determinants of what is stated/asserted/claimed, then what is stated
(/etc.) in different uses of “knowledge” sentences can vary
in truth conditions, even if ‘know(s)’ is not
context-sensitive. (Here, we see a connection between EC and its
philosophy-of-language namesake, which was mentioned in Section 2,
above; and a similar connection is evident in Charles Travis'
2005 paper.)

Ceding less ground, Peter Ludlow argues that questions about
gradability are too crude a standard by which to judge whether
‘know(s)’ is context-sensitive. Ludlow disagrees with
Hawthorne about the prevalence of clarificatory devices for
‘know(s)’ and argues that there is good reason to think its
semantics includes some placeholder(s) for the variable standards of
knowledge which EC posits. Like DeRose (2005), Ludlow casts EC as a piece
of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, and in that spirit he
presents the results of Google searches in which clauses like,
“…by objective standards”, “…by
academic standards”, “…with some certainty”,
“…doggone well…”, and so on, accompany uses
of ‘know(s)’. The latter are more data to be mulled over in
considering possible linguistic bases for EC. In general, from the fact
that different standards are employed, even explicitly adverted to, in
making some evaluative judgments (whether x is/isn't
F, whether S does/doesn't A) in different
domains, it does not immediately follow that a contextualistic
semantics for the relevant terms (‘F-ness’,
‘(to) A’) is correct (Conee 2005, 50–51). Some
standards that we employ in making a statement, for example, are
understood to be merely guidelines or rule of thumb, not direct
applications of the statement's truth conditions. Just as they were at
the center of debates about the merits of ordinary language philosophy
decades ago, methodological questions about the proper philosophical
handling of such data as Ludlow cites—whether to view them as
semantically revealing or grammatically misleading; whether, in the
present case, the relevant utterances involve the making-explicit of
context-variable standards for “knowledge”, or the
conveying of information over and above that encoded in
‘know(s)’ itself, etc.—arise as much here as with
the considerations initially used to motivate EC.

Questions have been raised about EC's ability to account for certain
other data. Andy Egan et al. (2005) argue that
‘relativism’, rather than EC, gets the semantics of
epistemic modals right. Bach (2005, 66) and Feldman (2004, 27)
question whether the contextualist model might apply to one's
thoughts about whether various knowledge sentences express
truths. Timothy Williamson (2005a, 100–101) and John Hawthorne (2004,
109–110) raise related concerns about the preservation of information
in memory and testimony. In addition, Williamson (ibid.,
102ff.) argues that EC, because it privileges attributor over subject
factors, does not respect the autonomy of the agent (subject),
qua agent, in settling the contents of questions involved in
practical decision making. And Hawthorne (ibid., 98ff.)
contends that EC has implausible consequences for reports of
propositional attitudes.

Whether any of these criticisms are effective against EC is
controversial. (See DeRose 1995, 6–7 and Rieber 1998, 197, e.g., on the
extension of EC to one's thoughts; DeRose 2006, Section 4 and
Cohen 2005b, 201–206 reply to Hawthorne's arguments concerning
belief reports.) However, whatever we make of these further issues, not
to mention the ones earlier raised, they could give us reason to reject
EC only if there were some viable alternative explanation of the
relevant data—in particular, of the apparently inconsistent
knowledge claims described in Section 3. On the other hand, if we could
explain those data without introducing a novel view about the semantics
of ‘know(s)’, that would considerably weaken the case for
EC.

Among critics of EC, at least three such purported explanations have
emerged.[21]
Since each is
intended to preserve the thought that we do ordinarily know many
things, the granting of knowledge in the relevant ‘low
standards’ case is taken to express a truth. What needs
explaining, then, is why denying knowledge of the same subject can seem
correct once the standards are raised, even though nothing in the
subject's situation changes. Though they are not obviously
competing, each attempt to explain this in non-contextualist terms
focuses on different factors. Framed in terms of the airport example
described in Section 3.4 above, and in broad outline only, these sample
non-contextualist proposals are as follows:

4.6.1 Pragmatic Factors

According to some (e.g., Blaauw 2003, Black, 2005, Brown 2006, Prades
2000, Pritchard 2010, Rysiew 2001, 2005,
2007),[22]
pragmatic factors explain the
relevant knowledge-attributing behavior. In the airport case, it is
mutually obvious to John and Mary that they want to ensure that their
epistemic position with respect to the flight plan is very
strong—strong enough to rule out the possibility of a misprint,
e.g. Being in an epistemic position of such strength may or may not be
required for knowing. Hence, whether Smith does know—whether the
proposition literally expressed by “Smith knows…” is
true—may or may not be relevant to John and Mary's concerns.
Either way, ‘S knows that p’ entails that
S is in a good epistemic position—this is why granting
someone knowledge involves representing them as entitled to their
belief. But it would be odd of Mary and John to grant Smith such an
entitlement (by saying ‘he knows’) and represent him as
being in a good epistemic position if they thought that his evidence
wasn't so good as to put their concerns to rest. Whereas, by
denying knowledge to Smith, they are able to express the thought, which seems
not just relevant but true, that his epistemic position is not so good
that they do not need to check further. And if they (we) read what is
conveyed by the relevant utterance onto the sentence uttered, the
knowledge denial will strike them (us) as expressing a truth.

4.6.2 Psychological Presuppositions of Attributing Knowledge

Several philosophers have suggested an essentially psychological
explanation of why we would deny that the subject in the high
standards case knows. Here is one such proposal:

Mary does not say ‘Smith knows that the plane will stop in
Chicago’ and goes so far as to assert its negation because of
her own doxastic situation. Because she is not sure Smith's
itinerary is reliable, she herself is not confident enough to believe
that the plane will stop in Chicago. So she cannot coherently
attribute knowledge of it to Smith, not if knowledge implies truth. In
general, you cannot coherently assert that someone knows that p if you
are not confident that p and think that it still needs to be
verified. That is why Mary cannot very well assert that Smith knows
that the plane will stop in Chicago. Not only that, she has to deny
that she knows it, since she thinks that it is not yet
established. And, since Smith has no evidence that she doesn't
have, she must deny that he knows it [too]. (Bach 2005,
76–77)

In a similar spirit, Adler 2006b suggests that such cases are best
explained in terms of the subject's diminished confidence as to
p, where the latter does not imply a lack of
belief. Meanwhile, Nagel notes that, when a person has much riding on
some matter, we normally expect them to engage in more, and more
diligent, evidence-seeking behavior before arriving at confident
belief. For this reason, we naturally attribute to the subject in the
high standards case either less confident belief or confident belief
along with a state of evidence assessment that precedes fixed belief
(2008, 289).

4.6.3 Salience, Conflicting Arguments, and Focusing Effects

When we find people seeming to disagree about some matter, that is
often because there is a genuine conflict of evidence —
arguments and considerations on either side of the issue, none of
which can be easily dismissed. And which of these one focuses on can
affect one's view as to the truth of the proposition in
question. So, for instance, if Mary and John focus on the various ways
in which Smith might be mistaken (e.g., because of a misprint in the
itinerary), this can get them thinking that he does not know what he
claims to know, especially if focusing on a possibility tends to make
one over-rate its probability. (See especially Feldman 2001,
74–78. For similar ideas, see Williamson 2005a, 112; 2005b, 226; Conee
2005, 63–66; and Rysiew 2001, 502–505.)

Unsurprisingly, even among opponents of EC, each of these proposals is
contentious. And proponents of EC have raised specific doubts about
their viability. For instance, according to Cohen (1999, 80–82; 2001,
94) merely citing the existence conflicting arguments does not really
explain what needs explaining. And DeRose (1999, 2002) and Cohen
(1999) argue that the prospects for explaining the relevant data via
any kind of pragmatic or ‘warranted assertability’
manœuver are dim (arguments to which both Brown 2006 and Rysiew
2001, 2005, 2007 respond).

It is plausible to suppose that, if knowing requires believing on
the basis of evidence that entails what is believed, we have hardly any
knowledge at all. Hence the near-universal acceptance of fallibilism in
epistemology: denying that one can know on the basis of non-entailing
evidence is, it seems, not an option if we are to preserve the very
strong appearance that we do know many things (Cohen 1988, 91). Hence
the significance of ‘concessive knowledge attributions’
(CKAs) (Rysiew 2001)—i.e., sentences of the form
‘S knows that p, but it is possible that
q’ (where q entails not-p). To many,
utterances of such sentences sound very odd indeed:

If you claim that S knows that P, and yet
you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in
which not-P, it certainly seems as if you have granted that
S does not after all know that P. To speak of
fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of
error, just sounds contradictory…. If you are a
contented fallibilist, I implore you to be honest, be näive, hear
it afresh. ‘He knows, yet he has not eliminated all possibilities
of error.’ Even if you've numbed your ears, doesn't
this overt, explicit fallibilism still sound wrong? (1996,
549, 550)

If Lewis is correct though in supposing that the relevant utterances
are merely “overt, explicit” statements of
fallibilism (ibid., 550), their seeming incoherence suggests
that, contrary to our everyday epistemic pretensions, “knowledge
must be by definition infallible” after all (ibid.,
549).

Lewis' own attempt “to thread a course between the rock
of fallibilism and the whirlpool of skepticism” (Lewis 1996, 566)
involves embracing epistemic contextualism: We may say with the
infallibilist that S knows that p iff
S's evidence eliminates “every” possibility
in which not-p (ibid., 551). But since
‘every’ is (Lewis claims) restricted to a particular
conversational domain (ibid., 553–554), and since certain
not-p possibilities will be “properly ignored” in
a given situation, we preserve our intuitive non-skepticism.

Jason Stanley (2005a) attempts to block Lewis' move to EC and
defends fallibilism against the worry that overtly fallibilistic speech
is incoherent. According to Stanley, CKAs are not just odd-sounding: in
most cases, they are simply false. But this does not impugn
fallibilism. Insofar as the odd-sounding utterances Lewis cites state
the fallibilist idea, the latter portion thereof (‘S
cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-p’,
e.g.) expresses the idea that the subject's evidence does not
entail what is said to be known—hence, it does not entail that every
proposition contrary to p is not
true.[23]
According to
Stanley, however, this is not the best reading of the possibility
clauses CKAs contain. On the correct account of such statements of
epistemic possibility, ‘It is possible [for A] that
p’ is true if and only if what A knows does
not, in a manner that is obvious to A, entail not-p.
(Cf. DeRose 1991, 1999; and Hawthorne 2004, 24–28.) So, while the
sentences Lewis cites are self-contradictory, they do not capture the
fallibilist idea after all.

Dougherty and Rysiew (2009) offer a different strategy for
accounting for CKAs' oddity while both protecting fallibilism and
avoiding EC. While they grant that the latter portion of CKAs express
epistemic possibility, they recommend thinking of what is epistemically
possible for a subject in terms of those things which his evidence,
rather than what he knows, does not rule out. On this view, CKAs
express, as Lewis assumes, precisely the fallibilist idea. According to
Dougherty and Rysiew, however, their oddity poses no problem for
fallibilism, and so does not motivate the adoption of contextualism, as
that oddity can be explained pragmatically, in the same way that
Moore-type sentences (‘p, but I don't believe
it’) are generally held to be.

Which (if either) of these responses to the problem Lewis sets is
correct is a matter of dispute. But there are at least these two ways
in which a non-contextualist could counter Lewis' argument.

A number of
philosophers[24]
have found very plausible the idea that, in asserting that p,
one represents oneself as knowing that p. Here, very quickly,
is one route to this idea: If our talk is governed by ‘the
Cooperative Principle’ (CP), then ‘saying’ itself
presumes one's striving to fulfill certain credal-epistemic
conditions: chief among the Gricean maxims is that of Quality,
‘Try to make your contribution one that is true,’ along
with its two more specific sub-maxims:

‘Do not say what you believe to be false;’ and

‘Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.’
(Grice 1989, 27)

Now notice that the properties addressed by Quality and its
sub-maxims closely approximate what are generally taken to be the
central conditions on knowing (so long, at least, as we are open-minded
as to how to read ii—such that, e.g.,
‘justification’ could be substituted for
‘evidence’). So it seems that, if one is striving to
conform to CP, one shouldn't ‘say’ something if one
takes oneself not to know it—hence, that if one does
say that p, one commits oneself to this condition's
not being unfulfilled; i.e., to one's
actually being in the knowing relation to p.

According to some, this same idea can be expressed by saying that
knowledge is “the norm of assertion”. Thus, Timothy
Williamson (2000, Chapter 11) defends at length what is come to be
known as ‘the knowledge account of assertion,’ whereby our
linguistic practices are governed by the rule: “One must: assert
p only if one knows p” (2000, 243)

Keith DeRose, taking the two ideas just expressed to be “just
two sides of the same coin” (2002, 180), argues that, if the
knowledge account of assertion is correct, it furnishes a different
sort of argument for EC, which is summarized as follows:

If the standards for when one is in a position to warrantedly assert
that P are the same as those that constitute a truth
condition for ‘I know that P,’ then if the former
vary with context, so do the latter. In short: The knowledge account
of assertion together with the context sensitivity of
assertability… yields contextualism about knowledge.
(Ibid.,187)

Several objections to this argument have been made. First, it is
worth considering whether one couldn't accept the idea, for
reasons such as those outlined above, that in asserting that p
one represents oneself as knowing that p, while taking the
rule governing assertion to be, say, ‘Do not assert what you take
yourself not to know,’ or some such. According to Matt Weiner
(2005), for instance, the knowledge rule is too strong, and the cases
which motivate it can be handled assuming the rule that proper
assertions be true, along with conversational norms governing all
speech acts. Second, Adam Leite (2007) argues that the direct argument
for contextualism from the knowledge account of assertion rests on an
equivocation on the notion of ‘warranted assertability’.
(See too Bach 2005, 73–4, who also suggests that DeRose's
argument rests too heavily on first-person knowledge claims). And
Thomas Blackson (2004) argues, as Williamson (2005a, 111, n. 20)
suggests, that DeRose's argument does not favor EC over another
recent view, “subject-sensitive invariantism”, as it is
sometimes called (see next Section). Quite independently of its
relation to EC, the relation between knowledge and assertion has been
the focus of much recent attention.

Besides forcing non-contextualist epistemologists to give more
attention to such matters as the pragmatics of knowledge attributions,
and certain features of our actual knowledge-attributing practices, EC
has been instrumental in the development of other competing theories.
Prompted in part by a dissatisfaction with EC, several other views have
recently been proposed. They are said by their proponents to do a
better job of accommodating the sort of data, both ordinary and
extraordinary, which inspire EC. These views are:

Contrastivism, of which Jonathan Shaffer (e.g., 2004) is the
leading proponent (but see too Karjalainen and Morton 2003).

According to the first of these views, as Schaffer discusses it, while
EC holds that ‘knows’ expresses different two-term
relations (between subjects and propositions) in different contexts,
according to contrastivism, ‘knows’ denotes a three-place
relation, with a contrast variable being included among the
relata. The latter may be ‘shifty’, when it is not
explicitly provided. Thus, in the same way that ‘Jane prefers
vanilla’ may express a true proposition when the
contextually-provided contrast is strawberry but a false proposition
when the contrast is chocolate, ‘Jane knows that she has
hands’ may be true when the contrast is her having lost her
hands in an accident, but false when the contrast is her being a
handless BIV. (Some claim that contrastivism in a species of EC; for
Schaffer on the differences between contrastivism and canonical
versions of EC, see his 2004.)

According to the second view, whether a subject knows—though
not what is expressed by the relevant knowledge sentences
themselves—depends upon facts about his/her practical interests (or,
depending on the view, what the subject believes about such),
especially the degree of practical importance to the subject of
getting the matter correct. As a rule, on this view, the more
that's at stake, the more it takes to know.

According to the third, the truth values of knowledge sentences depend
upon the standards in play in the contexts in which they are assessed,
as opposed to the standards operative in either the context in which
they are uttered or the context of the subject. (In certain cases, of
course—e.g., when subject, speaker and assessor occupy a
single context—these standards may coincide.)

The various strengths and weakness of each of these views —
considered both on their own, and as compared with each other, with EC,
and with traditional (insensitive) invariantism—is the subject of
much recent discussion. Unsurprisingly, no clear consensus has
emerged.

–––, 1994, “Contextualism and Anti-Contextualism in the
Philosophy of Language”, in Foundations of Speech Act Theory:
Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, S. L. Tsohatzidis ed.,
London and New York: Routledge, pp. 156–166.